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He dressed in business-casual attire, sometimes wearing an ID badge around his neck. When
following employees through a controlled-access outside door, he might even play the gentleman.

“He steps in there and says, ‘Let me hold that for you,’” Warren County Prosecutor David P.
Fornshell said.

Cobb was polite and friendly, as cool as the lunchroom refrigerator. For him, it was just
another day at the office.

Your office.

Investigators from across Ohio say Cobb was a top-notch “office creeper,” a brazen thief who
strolled the halls and stalked the cubicles of the massive office buildings in which so many
Ohioans spend their working days.

It took a multicounty, multiagency effort to catch and prosecute Cobb, 55, and his cast of
co-conspirators.

After Cobb rooted through purses, stole credit cards and slipped away, his partners in crime
rushed to retail stores and racked up thousands of dollars in charges, typically buying
harder-to-trace gift cards, according to an indictment filed last fall by Fornshell and special
prosecutors with Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office.

When a credit-card company flagged and froze one card, they moved on to the next, often in the
self-scan checkout lines that didn’t draw as much scrutiny.

Police and security experts say that office creepers rely on their own bravado and the
sometimes-impersonal nature of large corporate settings.

They also count on the reluctance of victims to question and possibly falsely accuse someone
they fear could be a legitimate co-worker. But doing precisely that is the best way to protect
yourself and your colleagues, the experts say.

Few office creepers were as organized as Cobb, investigators said. His most-recent run, which
began just months after his 2012 release from prison, lasted about a year and netted at least
$100,000, the indictment said. He was suspected of hitting dozens of businesses, including some in
Columbus and Dublin.

“These individuals were part of a large crime ring that stole credit cards out of the purses and
wallets of unsuspecting employees in offices stretching from Cincinnati to Youngstown,” DeWine said
in a statement after Cobb was sentenced on Feb. 3 to seven years in prison.

“This was a way of life for this guy,” Fornshell said.

Cobb had been in central Ohio before his latest crimes. He was sentenced in 2007 to six years in
prison for a robbery in which he disguised himself as a deliveryman to get inside a Nationwide
building Downtown. He stole from several employees and struggled with security when confronted.

He wrote to Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Pat Sheeran from prison in 2011, asking for early
release because he was “truly remorseful,” he said.

Assistant County Prosecutor David Zeyen didn’t buy it, countering in court papers that Cobb had
a record of theft-related convictions dating to 1974. “Larry Cobb is a lifelong thief who deserved
every bit of the six years this court gave him,” Zeyen said.

Sheeran granted judicial release on March 1, 2012. According to the indictment filed last fall,
Cobb was back at office creeping two months later. He settled in Mansfield in Richland County and
recruited at least three others to assist him.

By August, law-enforcement agencies across Ohio had noticed a rash of similar crimes and decided
to team up with the state to stop them.

Investigators spent months building a case that Cobb ran a criminal organization that was
engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, the state’s version of racketeering.

“There were probably a hundred or more cases at least where they were suspected of being
involved,” Fornshell said.

“Those are just the ones we know about,” said Dublin police detective Erik Gilleland, who
investigated thefts at Fiserv Inc. on Perimeter Drive. “That’s probably a quarter of what they’ve
done.”

Indictments of Cobb and three others were filed in Warren County on Oct. 28. His co-conspirators
were given sentences ranging from probation to four years.

Rod Hale, operations director of Aegis Protective Services of Cincinnati and a retired police
chief, said thieves such as Cobb are brazen. Secure doors and video surveillance often aren’t
enough to stop them.

He advises employees to lock their valuables in a desk drawer and trust their instincts. Many
theft victims later tell police they thought something was off about a person they saw in the
building, but they hesitated to say anything.

“It’s the ‘probably-nothing-to-it’ philosophy,” Hale said.

Fornshell said, “Everybody thinks maybe somebody else is going to confront them if they’re out
of place, and nobody ends up doing it.”

Employees should tell security or a supervisor if they’re uncomfortable confronting someone they
suspect of being up to no good, he said.